Healthcare today is fractured. Patients navigate specialists unfamiliar with each other’s data, chronic conditions balloon into long cascades of medication, and the true drivers of disease—like inflammation, metabolic dysregulation, and microbiome imbalance—remain obscured. In this episode, Dr. Erica Armstrong, founder and CEO of Root Functional Medicine, lays bare the limitations of a symptom-driven system and introduces a compelling vision for integrated, root-cause care that echoes Convergence Lab’s mission: to bring care disciplines together around shared biology, shared data, and shared outcomes.

Drawing on her years as a family physician and functional medicine leader, Dr. Armstrong identifies the central tension in today’s delivery models: doing the right checklist of tests and prescriptions, yet still seeing patients cycle through specialists and medications without answers. Her work demonstrates that inflammation isn’t a byproduct—it’s a hub, connecting oral microbiome, gut health, endocrine disruption, stress biology, and more. Treating these signals in isolation leads to more cost, more comorbidity, and more confusion; treating them as interlinked systems reshapes what’s possible.

The episode doesn’t just diagnose problems; it points to emerging enablers of health transformation—virtual-first platforms, employer-sponsored care innovation, and data-enabled screening that goes beyond conventional vitals. Dr. Armstrong challenges listeners to ask better questions in clinical encounters and to treat markers like high-sensitivity CRP and detailed metabolic panels as opportunities for prevention rather than after-the-fact risk flags. In doing so, she highlights the same strategic themes that underpin Mariya Filipova’s work at the intersection of healthcare systems, innovation, and oral-systemic integration—where oral health isn’t peripheral, but central to whole-person well-being, cost effectiveness, and system transformation

Forward-looking and practical, this conversation reorients listeners toward a future where care isn’t just about fixing what’s broken, but understanding why things break in the first place—and designing systems that keep people well. Clinicians, executives, policymakers, and health innovators will walk away not only with new insights, but with a renewed sense of urgency about how integration across disciplines can unlock better outcomes at lower long-term cost.